Remembering Arthur Penn and the Last Scene in Bonnie and Clyde

American director Arthur Penn died last night, a day after his 88th birthday. Penn, the brother of deceased photographer Irving Penn, directed such landmark films as The Miracle Worker and, most famously, Bonnie and Clyde. Without the latter, The New York Times estimates, classics such as The Godfather and Taxi Driver “would have been unthinkable.” Bonnie and Clyde “was sexually explicit in ways unseen in Hollywood since the imposition of the Production Code in 1934—when Bonnie stroked Clyde’s gun, the symbolism was unmistakable—it was violent in ways that had never been seen before,” the Times reports. In a recent interview (above), Penn revealed that he'd been “uncertain at the beginning [if he had] wanted to do a film about gangsters” but eventually conceived of the movie as a “very potent social film here about the depression and what it was like.” Of the film’s shocking ending, the Times notes that viewers “were stunned when this attractive outlaw couple died in a torrent of bullets, their bodies twitching in slow motion as their clothes turned red with blood.” In a 1989 interview with NPR, Penn said, “It seemed to me that if we were going to depict violence, then we would be obliged to really depict it accurately; the kind of terrible, frightening volume that one sees when one genuinely is confronted by violence.” Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967 into a media environment saturated with reel after reel of video footage of the Vietnam War. “Every time you see somebody attempting violence, they go into that basic slow motion. Well, in American films at least, we did it first,” Penn said. More than 40 years later, the scene (below) remains disturbing and hypnotic.